


World, Wavering

by Morbane



Category: Worldweavers - Alma Alexander
Genre: Apocalypse, Gen, Slice of Life, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 14:16:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: During the lackmagic crisis, Thea attempts to save the world - but most people can only watch, and hope, and fear, as it appears to crumble.





	World, Wavering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Doranwen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doranwen/gifts).



Rayna pushed the shed door open carefully - it was heavy, but hung properly, so that when it built up momentum sometimes it slipped out of her grip and crashed into the opposite wall.

At the back of the great shed were Gram's supplies: ropes, tarps, little pyrophane stoves, rags, large bottles of water marked with dates, and rows and rows of cans. 

Rayna thumbed the little cardboard strip that held the charm Jem had given her, and pressed it to a can on the top shelf. In the shed's dimness - lit only by the sunlight streaming through the door - it glowed green enough for her to read the expiry date. Ages away. The test had worked.

Jem's family were a sort you got a lot around here. They liked to keep magic at arm's length, and when Rayna had asked how, Jem had let her borrow Jem's charm. It sounded like a contradiction, but it wasn't one. Jem's mother wouldn't let her children eat anything with magic in it, so they used a home-written twist-charm as a 'reader'. Rayna had an idea of how to test it. On the cans where the shelf-life spell had faded, the charm wouldn't glow at all.

Which was how it was acting on a can one shelf down.

Rayna frowned, and squinted, shuffling awkwardly on the ladder to put herself between the can and the doorway light. No - nothing. Which was weird, because Gram rotated the cans regularly, storing new ones at the top, moving the old ones down. Anything this high up should be edible for years.

She tried it on another and another. Nothing but a dim glow on the very topmost cans.

She put the charm back in her pocket and left the shed. She supposed the charm itself was waning, rather than the magic it was meant to test. But all the same, maybe she'd ask Jem to try it in front of her. Or eat Gram's cooking... cautiously.

* * *

At first it just felt like the kind of day where everything was literally cursed.

It wouldn't be a surprise at Kanthi's workplace, which was the Tax Department call centre, which literally received dozens of curses a month. At least the calls had been digitally encoded since before Kanthi's time, which meant it was no longer possible for a caller to whisper a malediction straight into Kanthi's ear. But there were still deliveries. Letters. Once, apparently, in a similar call centre in Minnesota, an office chair that had a noxious disease spell sewn into the padding.

Kanthi avoided the urge to feel around the back of her chair when, in a span of two hours, the coffee machine broke, one printer jammed and then the next jammed as soon as the first was fixed, and then Tanja, an old and difficult acquaintance, left her a voice message asking to borrow Kanthi's sewing machine.

Then, as Kanthi put the phone down on a caller whom she had just - somehow - soothed from angry tears to resigned sniffling, she looked up just in time to see the office-plant-illusion on the wall by Jared's desk go brown, all at once, as if the light of the illusion had burned the leaves below it as it disappeared. And she knew in that moment that something was very, very wrong, and a curse would have been better.

That was before _lackmagic_ hit the news. Months later, as it crept on, and other shoots of human magic wilted and withdrew, people asked each other, "When did you notice?"

Tanja would claim it had been (impossibly) long ago, at least the previous year, and that she had learned from signs in animals and the wind. Kanthi did not mention the coffee machine.

* * *

The road past Nina's house, for all that it wound through miles of forest and little else, was wide, because it was the road to the mine. Today - and for the last week - traffic had been light. Nina had heard only a few vehicles pass since her sister Arlene had driven off several hours ago.

Her jaw had been set in a grim line. Arlene was the union rep.

It hadn't come to a strike - yet. "Reduced shifts" and "additional safety measures" had been conceded by the mine management team, but Nina knew that Arlene's opinion of the safety measures couldn't be spoken, only spat out or snarled. Spells to warn of shaft collapses, to encapsulate pockets of dangerous gases, and to dampen the heat and sparks of friction, had been used in mines for centuries: the non-magical equivalent was paltry in comparison.

There was also no technological equivalent of the spells that lowered machine noise to a bearable level while allowing miners to communicate in ordinary speech - nor was the deputy manager even trying to find a serious replacement, having refused to include this on the list of matters crucial to safety.

"Jason jumps when you tell him to jump," Arlene had vented to Nina. "Lloyd and I made the complaint, and he made a big show of all the money he's spending - on useless measures that won't keep miners safe."

Nina knew that Arlene wasn't looking forward to the argument she had to make: that in the rush to _appear_ to be doing something about the problem of lackmagic, and spells fading that had kept miners safe, the management had paid for bandaids that would only lead to more wounds.

She also knew that before heading out today, Arlene had read the paper now spread in unusual disarray across the sisters' kitchen table.

The editorial would have drawn her mouth into an especially sharp line. _Least affected industry raises the loudest cry_ , from an anti-union voice.

From all Nina had heard, it was true that close to the centre of the earth the magic was the truest; the farther towards the stars, the more it wavered. That had always been true; it was the factor that had caused the prophesized Space Age to peter out, as the twentieth century marked an increased reliance on _spell_ technology.

It was true now. But even in the depths of the earth, the magic fled. Even the base of the foundations trembled.

* * *

"It's only until Grandpa's carer gets back from vacation," Alison's mother reminded her, again. Alison hadn't even said anything. This was typical of conversations between Alison's mother and Alison.

Grandpa and Grandma were normally fine on their own, or 'their own' plus visits from Diana every few days. But Alison's mother was so worried about the lackmagic news that she had insisted Grandpa and Grandma come to stay with them while the carer was away.

And Alison loved her grandparents, but it was finals week and she had sports practices and it kept her up at night, hearing them go back and forth, and they were early risers and woke her up too...

And the magic in Grandma's hearing aid was winking in and out.

"It's a good thing, I think," Alison's father said softly, in his quiet, deliberate way, "that they haven't brought in those new magical pacemakers, isn't it?"

And Allison thought of Grandpa, and also of her grand-aunt who had one too, and after that - for at least a day - her comments on the situation would not have been audible to anyone's ears.

* * *

"Too close to the sun," the man intoned, and Tisha scowled at him, scuffed the stones under her shoe, walking past. She'd never thrown a stone at anyone but he made her want to. He wasn't a local. His pale skin was an angry red, but still he stood outside the hotel, every blazing morning, just outside the barriers that marked the fall area. No one had been in the luxury glass-bottomed pool when it had fallen, at night, over fifty stories. Even so, the debris had injured three.

"Like Icarus," he said. "Our magic fades, close to the sun. But still we leap - and fall!" A fist gesture for emphasis. "Let us crawl humble..."

The hotel that Tisha worked in was only twenty stories high, modest in this capital of excess. But in the last week, there had been only a handful of housekeeping calls to the upper stories. Everyone, it seemed, believed the new lore: that the magic in the heights was not just tattered, but almost gone.

The falling satellites. The abandoned penthouses: over a hundred metres up was a subtle ghost city, stretching across the world. Like the clouds coming down, dissolving what man had made.

* * *

It was the middle of a restless night - after months of restless nights. Miriam woke up to a play of light on the dresser, interwoven LEDs and charms. She blinked, stupidly, at it, then rolled over to look at her usual alarm clock, which gave, in its steady digital light, 2am.

It was a charm hadn't worked for six months. It was a charm that had stopped working long before lackmagic had made the news, and Miriam had dithered for months on taking it to a renewer-mage, or leaving it as it was - it was pretty even when it wasn't working - or getting rid of it.

It was something so innocuous that she'd never even guessed lackmagic could have broken it.

It was only now she guessed at this, because something had made it start again.

If this was the dawn to humanity's night, it was a strange one, but Miriam would take it. She lay awake, staring as if hypnotised, at a toy - and for a long while she was afraid to look elsewhere, to seek proof or prove herself wrong.

It was true dawn, outside, before she checked the news, called her best friend, and really believed.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Doranwen, I hope you enjoy this - I was so pleased when I realised I could combine your likes of apocalypses and worldbuilding at a natural point in canon. 
> 
> Alternate title, in case the pun pleases you: 'A World Affrayed'.


End file.
